Every person in your life is either going to be a bridge that leads you to something better, something greater in your life, or they are going to be a bridge that leads you to something worse. The environment that you live in is going to impact the way that you live your life in every aspect that you can imagine. The people you surround yourself with are going to impact who you become and who you will want to be. If you are surrounding yourself with people that you do not encourage you, if you are surrounding yourself with people that constantly put you down over and over again or people who encourage you to do things that you know you should not, or things that will make your life worse, then bettering yourself will become nearly impossible. Even if you know what is best for you your environment will start to change you and take its toll on you over time.
It might be possible to fight against your environment, but it will be very very hard. So what you need to do is start looking at the people in your life that are bridges. Are the people in your life trying to lead you towards a better you? Do the people in your life want what is best for you, truly? Or are the people in your life leading you towards a lesser you? Are the people in your life bringing you down? Do the people in your life want to see you succeed or do they want to see you broken? Do the people in your life constantly bring you pain or do they bring you joy? Do the people in your life shoot you down or do they tell you all of the reasons why you can succeed? Where does their bridge lead? And is the bridge that your friends are providing worth keeping in your life?
If you have the people in your life that are lesser, if you have the people in your life that are leading you to pain, or failure, or low self-worth, then man you have got to burn those bridges and not look back. The bridges in your life that are going to lead you into nothing but pain and depression are not worth keeping in your life. You do not have to hate those people, but you are not doing them any favors by keeping them in your life. If anything you are enabling them to continue bringing people down, and guess what. If they are constantly bringing you and/or others down, they probably don't have a whole lot of confidence in themselves either and you are enabling them to continue this attitude towards themselves. Sometimes people need a rude awakening to become the best version of themselves. If someone is drowning and they are trying to pull you down with them, let go. You cannot save everybody.
It all starts with you.
